Monday, January 4, 2016

Creed

Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) says a couple of good
things to his protégé Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan) in Creed. One of them occurs when Adonis is
poised in a mirror readying himself to shadowbox. Rocky says, “See that guy
staring at you. That’s your toughest opponent.” The rest of the film is pap and
no match for instance for films like The Fighter, David O Russell’s portrait of
the great Mickey Ward or masterpieces like Requiem for a Heavyweightand Martin
Scorsese’s Raging Bull, which told the
story of Jake LaMotta. Here RyanCoogler, who directed, relies on pat melodrama. Rocky is diagnosed with
non Hodgkins lymphoma as young Adonis, who turns out to be the illegitimate son
of the legendary Apollo, steps up to the plate against a seasoned opponent, "Pretty" Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew).Are
Rocky and Adonis up for the fight, respectively for and of their lives? But the real question is the fight. You have
boxers and fighters, those who are hard to catch (the boring undefeated Floyd Mayweather epitomizes the former) and those who like to mix up like Tyson, Foreman Frazier, Hagler and Hearns. Adonis is portrayed as green.
He’s had 15 fights in Mexico, but only one real win in a sanctioned bout and he
has his work cut out for him in fighting a world champ. To begin with, in
reality, such an improbable matchup would never happen. Even considering Adonis’
pedigree, the veteran would have too much to lose in such an upset—even
considering that the character in the movie is on his way to prison where he’ll
be serving a long jail term. But puttingboxing promotion aside, it’s really hard to understand what makes these
the two Sammy’s run. Adonis starts off looking like a boxer and his opponent is
definitely a classic brawler, but by the end of the fight it’s just the story of Adonis
waking up in the middle of a tremendous beating to become the fighter he's meant to be. It’s a great idea. Send a mildly talented fighter in the ring
against a master and hope something will be ignited. But what would the great Cus D’Amato have advised? What Creed portrays is manslaughter.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.